


The Wave Corrects

by Sholio



Category: The Death Gate Cycle - Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
Genre: Gen, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-06-08 18:28:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15249345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Missing scene forInto the Labyrinth. The reunion in the Vortex - healing, choices, and a dog. (Also fills the "magical trouble" square on my h/c bingo card.)





	The Wave Corrects

**Author's Note:**

> I just finished _Into the Labyrinth_ (Book 6) in my Death Gate reread, and I feel as if we were cheated of some h/c and Sartan-Patryn healing, dammit, considering what awful shape Haplo was in when they gated into the Vortex. So, fanfic.

It was the dog, licking his face, that woke Alfred -- and convinced him that he wasn't dreaming. In spite of that, he made an earnest stab at trying to believe that he was dreaming anyway, squeezing his eyes shut against the dog's enthusiastic tongue.

This only made the dog start barking vigorously, its loud yaps echoing off the inside of the chamber.

"Good boy," Alfred groaned, cracking his eyes open. "Nice boy." He gave up on trying to shut out the world and sat up, which made the dog pile onto him again, licking his already well-licked face, and then dashed to its master, and barked at him again.

And that recalled Alfred, with a deep sense of shame, to the responsibilities he'd been ignoring.

He struggled to his feet. Chelestra seawater puddled the floor, and Alfred did his best not to step in it. The three people who had come through the gate lay sprawled where they'd fallen. He couldn't remember if he had cast a sleep spell on them, or if they'd simply passed out -- two of them, anyway. Haplo's problem was clearly something else.

It was to Haplo that Alfred went, and knelt beside him, graceful as he usually was when he managed to focus entirely on something else -- someone else -- enough to forget himself for a change. The runes on Haplo's skin were partially obliterated with Chelestra seawater, though they were starting to reappear faintly as he dried out and his magic came back.

And his arm ...

Alfred couldn't even imagine how he'd managed to do this to himself with his protective runes to defend him. It had to have been a spell; either one cast on him, or one he'd tried that had gone horribly wrong. His hand was nearly obliterated, his arm blackened as if it had been set on fire, nearly up to the shoulder. A mensch would almost certainly have been dead from such a grievous wound. Haplo looked near death himself, his skin chalk-white and clammy, his breathing so faint it could barely be seen. Even in profound unconsciousness, he was curled on himself, as if the pain he felt was so great that he could not escape it even in a near-coma.

The dog pressed its nose against Haplo's neck and looked beseechingly at Alfred.

"We have to stop meeting like this, my friend," he murmured -- using that word when Haplo couldn't hear him, suspecting the Patryn would not appreciate it. But as always with Haplo, he was never sure.

Because of the nature of the injury, gripping Haplo's hands was not going to work this time, as he'd done twice before when he'd healed him. They had to join the circle some other way. Alfred gathered Haplo into his lap, very carefully, trying not to hurt him and, just as cautiously, trying not to become wet; if he allowed the water to disrupt his magic this time, Haplo might die.

He took Haplo's uninjured hand in his, wrapped his fingers around Haplo's icy ones, and rested their joined hands on Haplo's chest, above the place where -- beneath his shirt -- the rune that was his name and the core of his being was tattooed on his chest. Alfred rested his other hand on Haplo's shoulder.

The dog lay down with its body against its dying master's, its head up and ears pricked forward, watching Alfred intently. The thought occurred to Alfred to wonder if the dog's presence might actually help. Even if it didn't, the dog would be able to protect them both against the strange Patryn woman, whose motives were unknown -- who would certainly have no love for Alfred when she woke and realized who he was.

"Not that I can blame you for your hate," Alfred murmured, and then turned his face away from her, forced himself not to think of it; he could feel Haplo shivering slightly in his arms, too weak to even do much of that, and he needed all his concentration. "Watch out for us," he told the dog, whose ears flicked and white eyebrows shifted responsively. And then he sank into concentration, willing his own life energy to flow into Haplo as he began, softly, to sing the runes.

After doing this twice before, it should have been easier the third time, but it was strangely difficult, as if something was blocking him. The seawater shouldn't have done that, at least not to this extent; he'd healed Haplo on Chelestra when the Patryn was drenched in the stuff. It was more as if the circle of Haplo's being didn't want to link up, as if some of the damage was stopping it from being able to fully connect somehow. And it wasn't the damage to his arm. It was as if Haplo's being itself had been rent in two.

_What has happened to you, since we last saw each other?_

But he could also feel Haplo's weakness and hurt, the way Haplo's entire being was consumed with pain and shock -- and it was that ( _pity, mercy, compassion_ ) that made him push himself in a way he never had before, throwing his entire being into the effort, to the point where he wasn't entirely sure he'd be able to pull himself back in time if Haplo did give up the fight he was clearly losing. Haplo's death might take them both down. But there was no other way.

Healing using Sartan magic was never like this. It could be strenuous, it could be traumatic (he very deliberately did not think of Hugh, or of Bane) but it never forced you to tear yourself open, to take another's pain into your own soul, to risk your own life to save another.

_Maybe that is what the Patryns had that we never had. Maybe we would never have thought of sundering a world, if we'd been forced to sunder our own souls to save the ones we loved from their pain, rather than soothing away hurts with a cool touch ..._

In the end it was not healing Haplo's severed heart rune that enabled the circle to close, it was Alfred holding it together himself with brute force. The shaky and tentative circle was joined in full, and Haplo's agony flowed into him -- and with it, a deluge of emotions that he felt voyeuristically guilty for being forced to share: confusion, doubt, misery, fear, despair. It wasn't just the heart rune that was rent in two; the struggle in Haplo's divided soul had been nearly tearing him in half.

 _It's all right,_ Alfred wanted to say, empty though the words were given their current situation. But he couldn't divert attention from the healing, from his own struggle to keep from being drowned in Haplo's pain. All he could do was send back all the life energy and reassurance he had to give, pouring himself into the well of Haplo's damaged soul and body.

He was dimly aware of Haplo's fingers tightening weakly on his own, giving back what little energy Haplo had to give, helping to stem the tide before it drained Alfred dry. Alfred's sense of the boundary between them wavered; it seemed for endless moments that they were one being in pain, struggling to put itself back together.

The dog gave a sudden, sharp bark, and Alfred, wrung out to the point of exhaustion, floundered his way back to awareness. The circle was still faintly joined, and sensations were doubled; he could feel, through Haplo, his own fingers clutching Haplo's, as he could feel Haplo's skin grown warmer beneath his own hand.

Opening his eyes and trying to shake off a feeling of dizziness, he saw that the strange Patryn woman was awake now, sitting up and staring at him.

Alfred gasped and dropped his gaze away from her, looking anywhere but at her. The dog was looking at her intensely enough for both of them. It would, he hoped, warn him if she tried anything.

Instead he gently disengaged from Haplo, whose injured arm was whole again, as if it had never been damaged. But he _wasn't_ whole; Alfred could see that now. The circle of Haplo's being had been broken somehow. Even now, when he should have fallen into a healing sleep after Alfred let go of him, he instead looked tense and restless, as if he hovered just below the edge of consciousness.

"Sleep," Alfred murmured. He laid his hand on Haplo's forehead -- damp from sweat, but no longer from seawater; the runes were almost back to their usual intensity -- and sang a quiet spell, tracing it against Haplo's skin with his fingertip. Haplo relaxed, falling into a deeper sleep. It still wasn't the healing trance he truly needed, but at least he'd get some rest.

The woman stirred. The dog jumped to its feet, a growl burbling in its throat, and the woman's stealthy attempt to reach for her dagger -- lying on the floor -- subsided. She sat still, watching the dog warily.

"Good boy," Alfred told the dog. "Good boy. Watch her. I, uh ..."

He found himself backing toward the door, and then he was out in the hallway, shuddering all over.

He leaned against the wall for a moment, sweat-drenched and weak. Part of it was exhaustion and lingering pain from the healing, though it was fading; his magic replenished itself quickly in this place, surrounded by the runes of his people. But a great deal more of it was simply ...

"There were no more choices," he murmured, pressing a shaking hand against the wall. Orla's coffin rested in a different part of the Vortex, but he could see it anytime he wanted simply by tracing a rune on the white stone. "There are no choices in this place, except the one, the unthinkable one." To go forth into the Labyrinth ... it was no choice, not really. Not for him. "All probability narrowed to a single choice. And then ..."

The Wave corrects itself. All the choices that had been taken away from him washed back onto him in a tide that threatened to drown him.

"No," he told himself, speaking to the air, a habit he'd developed in the mausoleum on Arianus and never really lost. "This doesn't mean anything has changed. I'm still _here._ And out there ..."

He closed his eyes, squeezing them shut as if he could as easily block out the knowledge of the choices he now had to make. It had been very hard, at first, knowing that people whose lives had been entangled with his own -- if only briefly -- were still out there in the worlds, in danger. But he'd learned not to think about it. It wasn't his problem anymore. He _wanted_ to help, he just ... couldn't. 

And now all that responsibility had fallen right back on top of him. It was one thing to know people he'd come to feel for, and the worlds themselves, were in danger somewhere else, but there was nothing he could do about any of it. This, though ... this ...

He wanted to flee. Wanted to hide himself in the deepest part of the Vortex until they left.

The hardest thing he'd ever done, it seemed, was gathering an armful of blankets and walking back into that room.

Nothing had changed. Everyone was exactly where he'd left them, woman, assassin, dagger, dog, and all. Casting extremely nervous glances at both the woman and the unconscious assassin, Alfred knelt, or rather tumbled, to the floor beside Haplo and began making a pallet for him from the blankets.

"Would you like a, um, a blanket?" he said to the woman, or more accurately to the floor somewhere between himself and her.

The woman didn't speak. There was something brittle about her, as if she held herself tightly in check. Her face was like stone. Alfred couldn't help thinking of Haplo, when he'd first met him.

It was all too confusing. He could feel his consciousness wanting to slip away. It took all he had to hold onto it. He meant to stay until Haplo woke up, he really did, but when Hugh the Hand began to stir, he'd had about all he could take, and he fled again.

The dog gave a sharp bark at his back, almost as if it was disappointed in him.

He would come back, he told himself. Eventually. When he'd had time to get himself together again.

Just ... not quite yet.


End file.
